Exclusive: Iran Election Results Totally Corrupt

As thousands of protesters took to the streets in Tehran this weekend, beginning what would swell into Iran’s largest protests since the revolution of 1979, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad didn’t want to hear their complaints that last week’s presidential election had been manipulated. Defending the vote’s legitimacy, he likened his opponents to unruly soccer fans acting up after their team had lost. But Ahmadinejad glossed over a glaring — and still unexplained — red flag.

How do you count 40 million hand-written ballots in a matter of hours?

In our post-hanging chad era, it should be fairly obvious that ballot-counting is a) a total pain in the ass, b) a not-so-quick process, and c) bureaucratic hell. Just ask the folks in Minnesota, where it took more than two weeks to hand-count the 2.9 million ballots cast in the Senate race between Republican Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken. And we all know how successful that vote-counting process has been.

“I just laughed,” said John Aiken, the communications director for Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, when I asked him what he thought when he heard about Iran’s ballot-counting prowess.To claim Friday’s election results were legitimate requires accepting the fact that the Iranian authorities managed to process all 39.2 million paper ballots between the close of polls at 10 p.m. local time and the next morning, when Iran’s Interior Ministry officially proclaimed Ahmadinejad the winner with 63 percent of the vote.

The announcement came little more than 12 hours after the last vote was cast. Which translates to approximately 3.27 million ballots counted per hour, 54,444 per minute, and 907 per second.

Speaking by phone yesterday, Ritchie estimated that he would have needed to enlist an army of one million ballot counters — or, put another way, one in five Minnesotans — to replicate the Iranians’ pace. “That’s not going to happen any time soon,” he said.

We aren’t the State Department, so we can’t flat-out say that these election results are totally corrupt. Or can we? Since most Web sites are not functioning in Iran, our MASSIVE Iranian readership won’t be able to see this anyway. So, you heard it here first: 907 votes per second = totally corrupt election results in Iran.